One 77-year-old’s search for the truth: 9/11, election fraud, illegal wars, Wall Street criminality, a stolen nuke, the neocon wars, control of the U.S. government by global corporations, the unjustified assault on Social Security, media complicity, and the "Great Recession" about to become the second Great Depression. "The most important truths are hidden from us by the powerful few who strive to steal the American dream by keeping We the People in the dark."

A former cybersecurity advisor to President George W. Bush says a
sophisticated computer hack could have been the cause of the automobile
accident that claimed the life of journalist Michael Hastings last week
in Los Angeles.

Richard Clarke, a State Department official-turned-special
advisor to several United States presidents, said the early
morning auto crash last Tuesday was "consistent with a car
cyberattack,” raising new questions about the death of the
award-winning journalist.

Hastings died last week when his 2013 Mercedes C250 coupe
collided with a tree in Los Angeles, California on the morning of
June 18. He was reportedly traveling at a high rate of speed and
failed to stop at a red light moments before the single-car
crash. He was only 33.

Speaking to Huffington Post this week, Clarke said that a
cyberattack waged at the vehicle could have caused the fatal
collision.

"What has been revealed as a result of some research at
universities is that it's relatively easy to hack your way into
the control system of a car, and to do such things as cause
acceleration when the driver doesn't want acceleration, to throw
on the brakes when the driver doesn't want the brakes on, to
launch an air bag," Clarke told The Huffington Post. "You
can do some really highly destructive things now, through hacking
a car, and it's not that hard."

"So if there were a cyberattack on the car — and I'm not
saying there was," Clarke continued, "I think whoever did
it would probably get away with it."

The Los Angeles Police Department said they don’t expect foul
play was involved in the crash, but an investigation has been
opened nonetheless.

In an email reportedly sent by Hastings hours before the crash,
he told colleagues that he thought he was the target of a federal
investigation.

“Hey [redacted}, the Feds are interviewing my ‘close friends
and associates,’” Hastings wrote 15 hours before the crash.

“Also: I’m onto a big story, and need to go off the rada[r]
for a bit,” he added. “All the best, and hope to see you
all soon.”

The email was supplied to KTLA News in Los Angeles by Staff Sgt.
Joseph Biggs, who says he met Hastings while the journalist was
embedded in Afghanistan in 2008. It was reportedly send to a
handful of Hastings’ associates and was blind-copied to Biggs.

“I just said it doesn’t seem like him. I don’t know, I just
had this gut feeling and it just really bothered me,” Biggs
told KTLA.

Reporters at Buzzfeed where Hastings worked say they received an
email from their colleague, but the Federal Bureau of
Investigation issued a statement two days after Hastings’ death
to quash rumors that they had been looking into the reporter.

“At no time was Michael Hastings under investigation by the
FBI,” FBI spokeswoman Laura Eimiller said.

According to the Associated Press, however, Hastings’
fingerprints were on file with the FBI and were used by the
bureau to identify his body after flames consumed much the auto
wreckage last week.

"I believe the FBI when they say they weren't investigating
him," Clarke told the Huffington Post. "That was very
unusual, and I'm sure they checked very carefully before they
said that."

"I'm not a conspiracy guy. In fact, I've spent most of my life
knocking down conspiracy theories," he said. "But my rule
has always been you don't knock down a conspiracy theory until
you can prove it [wrong]. And in the case of Michael Hastings,
what evidence is available publicly is consistent with a car
cyberattack. And the problem with that is you can't prove
it."

Clarke, 62, spent nearly two decades at the Pentagon before
relocating to the White House where he served under President
Ronald Reagan and both Presidents Bush. He served as special
advisor to President George W. Bush on cybersecurity until
leaving the administration in 2003 and is currently the chairman
and CEO of Good Harbor Security Risk Management, LLC.

“V For Vendetta,” a film that portrays evil in a futuristic England
as a proxy for the evil that exists today in America, ends with the
defeat of evil. But this is a movie in which the hero has super powers.
If you have not seen this film, you should watch it. It might wake you
up and give you courage. The excerpts below show that, at least among
some filmmakers, the desire for liberty still exists.

Whether the desire for liberty exists in America remains to be seen.
If Americans can overcome their gullibility, their lifelong
brainwashing, their propensity to believe every lie that “their”
government tells them, and if Americans can escape the Matrix in which
they live, they can reestablish the morality, justice, peace, freedom,
and liberty that “their” government has taken from them. It is not
impossible for Americans to again stand with uplifted heads. They only
have to recognize that “their” government is the enemy of truth,
justice, human rights and life itself.

Can mere ordinary Americans triumph over the evil that is “their”
government without the aid of a superhero? If ideas are strong enough
and Americans can comprehend them, good can prevail over the evil that
is concentrated in Washington. What stands between the American people
and their comprehension of evil is their gullibility.

If good fails in its battle with Washington’s evil, our future is a boot stamping on the human face forever.

If you, an American, living in superpower America lack the courage to
stand up to the evil that is “your” government, perhaps the courage of
Edward Snowden, Bradley Manning, Julian Assange, and tiny Ecuador will
give you heart.

A US senator from New Jersey, Robert Menendez, the Democratic
chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told the Ecuadoran
government that he would block the import of vegetables and flowers from
Ecuador if Ecuador gives asylum to Edward Snowden. The cost to Ecuador
would be one billion dollars in lost revenues.

Menendez’s statement–”Our government will not reward countries for
bad behavior”–is ironic. It equates bad behavior with protecting a
truth-teller and good behavior with betraying a truth-teller.
Menendez’s statement is also a lie. The US government only
rewards bad behavior. The US government consistently rewards those who
conspire against the elected governments of their own countries, setting
them up as dictators when Washington overthrows the elected
governments.

Menendez’s threat did not work, but the senator did succeed in
delivering yet another humiliating blow to Washington’s prestige. The
Ecuadoran President, Rafael Correa, beat Menendez to the punch and
cancelled the trade pact with the US on the grounds that the pact was a
threat to the sovereignty of Ecuador and to moral principles and was
being used by Washington to blackmail Ecuador. “Ecuador doesn’t accept
pressure or threats from anyone,” added Communications Secretary
Fernando Alvarado who then offered Washington foreign aid to provide
human rights training to combat torture, illegal executions and attacks
on peoples’ privacy.

Washington, exposed with its hand in the cookie jar devouring the
privacy of the entire world and prevented by its hubris from
acknowledging its illegal behavior and apologizing, has so mishandled
the Snowden affair that Washington has done far more damage to itself
than occurred from Snowden’s revelations. Washington has proven
conclusively that it has no respect for anyone’s human rights, that it
has no respect for any country’s sovereignty, that it has no respect for
any moral principles, especially those it most often mouths, and that
it relies on coercion and violence alone. The rest of the world now
knows who its enemy is.

Washington’s presstitutes, by helping Washington demonize Snowden,
Glenn Greenwald, Manning, Assange, and Ecuador, have demonstrated to the
world that the US media is devoid of integrity and that nothing it
reports can be believed. The US print and TV media and NPR comprise a
ministry of propaganda for Washington’s immoral agendas.

On June 24, the Stasi State’s favorite whore, the Washington Post,
denounced three times democratically-elected Rafael Correa as “the
autocratic leader of tiny, impoverished Ecuador,” without realizing that
the editorial not only demonstrated the Washington Post’s lack of any
ethics whatsoever but also showed the entire world that if “tiny,
impoverished Ecuador” can stand up to Washington’s threats, so can the
rest of the world.

President Correa replied that the Washington Post “managed to focus
attention on Snowden and on the ‘wicked’ countries that support him,
making us forget the terrible things against the US people and the whole
world that he denounced.” Correa added that Washington’s “world order
isn’t only unjust, it’s immoral.”

The reason Washington hates Correa has nothing to do with Snowden.
That Ecuador is considering asylum for Snowden is just an excuse.
Correa is hated, because in the second year of his first term he
repudiated the $3 billion dollar foreign debt that corrupt and despotic
prior regimes had been paid to contract with international finance.
Correa’s default threat forced the international financial gangsters to
write down the debt by 60 percent.

Washington also hates Correa because he has been successful in
reducing the high rates of poverty in Ecuador, thus building public
support that makes if difficult for Washington to overthrow him from
within.

Yet another reason Washington hates Correa is because he took steps
against the multinational oil companies’ exploitation of Ecuador’s oil
resources and limited the amount of offshore deposits in the country’s
banks in order to block Washington’s ability to destabilize Ecuador’s
financial system.

Washington also hates Correa for refusing to renew Washington’s lease of the air base in Manta.

Essentially, Correa has fought to take control of Ecuador’s
government, media and national resources out of Washington’s hands and
the hands of the small rich elite allied with Washington. It is a David
vs. Goliath story.

In other words, Correa, like Venezuela’s Chevez, is the rare foreign
leader who represents the interests of his own country instead of
Washington’s interest.

Washington uses the various corrupt NGOs and the puppet government in
Colombia as weapons against Correa and the Ecuadoran government. Many
believe that it is only a matter of time before Washington succeeds in
assassinating Correa.

American patriots, who feel that they should be on “their”
government’s side regardless of the facts, would do well to remember
what true patriotism is. For Americans, patriotism has always meant
allegiance to the Constitution, not to the government. The oath is to
defend the Constitution against enemies domestic and foreign. The Bush
and Obama regimes have proven themselves to be the Constitution’s worst
enemies. It is not possible for a true patriot to support a government
that destroys the Constitution. The United States is the Constitution.
Our country is not the Obama regime, the Bush regime, or some other
administration. Our country is the Constitution. The Constitution is
our country.

Beyond obligations to one’s own country, all humans have a
responsibility to human life itself. Washington’s puppet states, such as
the NATO countries, Japan, and Colombia, by providing cover and support
for Washington’s aggression are enabling Washington to drive the world
into World War III.

The temptation of Washington’s money easily overwhelms weak
characters such as Tony Blair and David Cameron. But the governments of
NATO countries and other accommodating states are not only selling out
their own peoples by supporting Washington’s wars of aggression, they
are selling out humanity. Washington’s hubris and arrogance grow as
Washington bumps off country after country. Sooner or later Russia and
China, will realize that they themselves are targets and will draw
firmer lines. Arrogance will prevent Washington from acknowledging the
lines, and the final war will be launched.

Washington’s hegemonic impulse is driving the world to destruction.
The peoples of the world should realize this and force their governments
to stop enabling Washington’s aggression.

Welcome to Informed Comment,
where I do my best to provide
an
independent and informed
perspective on Middle Eastern
and American
politics.

The police state, a term first coined in the mid-19th century in German (Polizeistaat), is characterized by a standing political police,
by intense domestic surveillance and by restrictions on the movements of
citizens. Police states are on a spectrum, and unfortunately in the
past decade the Unite States has moved toward police-stateness in small
but key ways. Here are the signs:

1. The United States National Security Administration recently requisitioned all
Verizon phone records in the US for a period of 3 months. Your
telephone records (who you called and for how long) say a great deal
about you. This is a form of mass surveillance.

3. The Federal government claims the right to examine the contents of
the laptops of US citizens whenever the enter the United States, in
contravention of the Fourth Amendment. Some 60 million Americans travel abroad annually.

4. The US has the highest incarceration rate
in the world. Those in prison have grown from 220 per 100,000
population to over 700 per 100,000 population since 1980. The US holds
over two million inmates, and has 6 million people at any one time under
carceral supervision– more than were in Stalin’s Gulag. State spending
on prisons has risen at 6 times the rate of spending on higher
education.

5. Some 6 million persons convicted of felonies have been disenfranchised and cannot vote.
Most are not in prison. Because of the ‘war on drugs,’ many of these
persons are not actually guilty of serious crimes. The practice hits
the poor and minorities. Some 7 percent of African-Americans is
ineligible to vote, but less than 2 percent of whites is.

6. Police can take DNA samples
of all arrestees on serious crimes, whether they are proven guilty or
not. Even Justice Scalia believes the ruling opens the door for DNA
sample collection for all arrests. Some 13 million Americans are arrested annually, 1.6 million on drugs charges and half of those on marijuana charges.

7. American police are becoming militarized,
with SWAT teams proliferating, and use of drones, GPS tracking devices,
and military equipment, as well as participation of National Guards in
the ‘war on drugs.’

8. Legislators are increasingly attempting to criminalize public protest,
as with a current bill that would make it a crime knowingly to
‘trespass’ in security zones where persons are found who are under
secret service protection. Authorities have sometimes also attempted to
restrict public protesters to “protest zones”, thus keeping them out of
the view of news cameras.

9. The USA PATRIOT Act institutes gag orders that are a violation of
the 1st Amendment,forbidding persons and companies from revealing that
the government has secretly asked for surveillance records.

Welcome to Informed Comment,
where I do my best to provide
an
independent and informed
perspective on Middle Eastern
and American
politics.

US television news is a danger to the security of the United States.
First, it is so oriented to ratings that it cannot afford to do
unpopular reports (thus, it ignored al-Qaeda and the Taliban for the
most part before 9/11). Second, it is so oriented toward the halls of
power inside the Beltway that it is unable to examine government
allegations critically. US television news was an unrelieved cheering
section for the launching of the illegal and disastrous Iraq War, which
will end up costing the taxpayers many trillions of dollars, which
seriously wounded 32,000 US military personnel (many of them will need
help the rest of their lives), which left over 4000 soldiers, Marines
and sailors dead, and which was responsible for the deaths of on the
order of 300,000 Iraqis, the wounding of 1.2 million Iraqis, and the
displacement from their homes of 4 million Iraqis (out of a then
population of 26 million). In 2002 and 2003, Bush administration
leakers and ex-generals led the television reporters and anchors by the
nose. The corporations were all for the war, and they own the news.
Where on-screen talent was unwilling to go along, such as Phil Donohue
or Ashley Banfield, they were just fired.

Now, corporate television news is repeating this shameful performance
with regard to the revelations by Edward Snowden of massive,
unconstitutional government surveillance of Americans’ electronic
communications. The full failure to do proper journalism was on display
on Sunday (when, unfortunately, critical voices such as Rachel Maddow
are absent). Here are the propaganda techniques used to stack the deck
on Sunday:

1. Focus on the personality, location, and charges against the leaker instead of the substance of his revelations.

2. Smear Snowden with ad hominem fallacies. His transit through
Moscow was held up as a sign of disloyalty to the United States, as
though nowadays American business people and government officials don’t
transit through Moscow all the time. The US ships significant amounts of military materiel for Afghanistan through Russia. Is that treasonous?

3. Focus on politicians making empty threats against China and
Russia for not being sufficiently obedient to the United States. The US
can’t do anything to either one that wouldn’t hurt the US more than it
did them.

4. Ignore important breaking stories that impugn the government case. For instance, The Guardian broke the story
Saturday morning that the NSA PRISM program was small compared to the
TEMPORA program of GCHQ, its British counterpart, which Snowden alleged
has attached sniffers to the fiber optic cables that stretch from New
York to London, and is vacuuming up massive amounts of email and
telephone conversations. A Lexis Nexis search in broadcast transcripts
for Sunday showed that no US news broadcaster mentioned TEMPORA
or GCHQ. This was true even though the NSA has 250 analysts assigned to
TEMPORA and even though that program sweeps up and stores exactly the
kind of material (telephone calls, emails) that President Obama denied
were being collected.

5. Skew the guest list. Television news interviewed Rep. Mike
Rogers (R-MI), Rep. Peter King (R-NY), Rep. Ilena Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL),
Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY), and a gaggle of retired FBI and CIA
figures. All of them without exception were cheerleaders for the Iraq
War. Glenn Greenwald was virtually the only voice allowed on the other
side. He was cut short on CNN and was at a disadvantage on television
because he was on the phone from Rio. Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), Al Gore,
Steve Wozniak, Pierre Omidyar, and a whole host of figures supportive of
Snowden having told us what is going on were not invited on the air to
balance the hard liners interviewed.

6. Accuse journalists of treason for reporting Snowden’s
revelations. This was the absolutely shameful tack taken by David
Gregory on Meet The Press, when he asked Greenwald, “To the extent that
you have aided and abetted Snowden, even in his current movements, why
shouldn’t you, Mr. Greenwald, be charged with a crime?” The “to the
extent” and “aided and abetted” language isn’t journalism it is shilling for the most despicable elements in Congress (and that is way over on the despicable scale).

7. Ignore past government misuse of classified information.
Television news has studiedly avoided referring to Dick Cheney’s outing
of Valerie Plame as a CIA field officer (and therefore outing of all the
CIA field officers who used the same dummy corporation as she did as a
cover,as well as all local informants known to be connected to that
dummy corporation). Television anchors seem to think that the
government is always trying to ‘protect’ us and is on the side of the
angels, and sidestep the question of whether secret information can be
used for private or shady policy purposes. Plame, by the way, is warning about the intelligence-industrial complex.

8. Continually allege or allow guests to allege that Snowden could
have taken his concerns to the NSA or to Congress internally. None of his predecessors had any luck with that approach.
Even sitting senators of the United States of America like Ron Wyden
have been muzzled and cannot conduct a public debate on these abuses.

9. No one on television has discussed how many of the 850,000
analysts with access to secret databases containing your information
work for private corporations such as Booz Allen Hamilton. That is, they aren’t even government employees. And, how much lobbying do these intelligence contractors do of Congress?

10. Focus the discussion on the alleged criminality of Snowden’s
disclosures instead of on the obvious lawlessness of programs such as
Tempora, which sweep up vast amounts of personal information on private
individuals and store them in data bases. As Noam Chomsky has said, the
way to distract the public in a democracy is to allow more and more
vigorous debate about a more and more narrow set of issues. By
narrowing the debate to “how illegal were Snowden’s actions?” instead of
allowing the question, “how legal are the NSA’s actions,” the US mass
media give the impression of debating both sides of a controversy while
in fact suppressing large numbers of pertinent questions.

Published on Jun 19, 2013"Earlier today, WikiLeaks sent out a cryptic tweet that hinted they had more information about yesterday's tragic death of reporter Michael Hastings. They followed through with another tweet claiming that Hastings reached out to one of their lawyers to reveal to them he believed the FBI was investigating him."*Our friend and colleague Michael Hastings died early Tuesday morning in a one-car crash in Los Angeles. Wikileaks' Twitter account is now reporting that hours before his death, Hastings contacted Wikileaks lawyer Jennifer Robinson saying he was being investigated by the FBI. Some establishment media outlets have taken care to try and assault Hasting's character and achievements as a journalist. Cenk Uygur breaks it down.

On June 19, 2013, US President Obama, hoping to raise himself above
the developing National Security Agency (NSA) spy scandals, sought to
associate himself with two iconic speeches made at the Brandenburg Gate
in Berlin.

Obama’s speech will go down in history as the most hypocritical of
all time. Little wonder that the audience was there by invitation only.
A real audience would have hooted Obama out of Berlin.

Perhaps the most hypocritical of all of Obama’s statements was his
proposal that the US and Russia reduce their nuclear weapons by
one-third. The entire world, and certainly the Russians, saw through
this ploy. The US is currently surrounding Russia with anti-ballistic
missiles on Russia’s borders and hopes to leverage this advantage by
talking Russia into reducing its weapons, thereby making it easier for
Washington to target them. Obama’s proposal is clearly intended to
weaken Russia’s nuclear deterrent and ability to resist US hegemony.

Obama spoke lofty words of peace, while beating the drums of war in
Syria and Iran. Witness Obama’s aggressive policies of surrounding
Russia with missile bases and establishing new military bases in the
Pacific Ocean with which to confront China.

This is the same Obama who promised to close the Guantanamo Torture
Prison, but did not; the same Obama who promised to tell us the purpose
for Washington’s decade-long war in Afghanistan, but did not; the same
Obama who promised to end the wars, but started new ones; the same
Obama who said he stood for the US Constitution, but shredded it; the
same Obama who refused to hold the Bush regime accountable for its
crimes against law and humanity; the same Obama who unleashed drones
against civilian populations in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Yemen; the
same Obama who claimed and exercised power to murder US citizens without
due process and who continues the Bush regime’s unconstitutional
practice of violating habeas corpus and detaining US citizens
indefinitely; the same Obama who promised transparency but runs the most
secretive government in US history.

The tyrant’s speech of spectacular hypocrisy elicited from the
invited audience applause on 36 occasions. Like so many others, Germans
proved themselves willing to be used for Washington’s propaganda
purposes.

Here was Obama, who consistently lies, speaking of “eternal truth.”

Here was Obama, who enabled Wall Street to rob the American and
European peoples and who destroyed Americans’ civil liberties and the
lives of vast numbers of Iraqis, Afghans, Yemenis, Libyans, Pakistanis,
Syrians, and others, speaking of “the yearnings of justice.” Obama
equates demands for justice with “terrorism.”

Here was Obama, who has constructed an international spy network and a
domestic police state, speaking of “the yearnings for freedom.”

Here was Obama, president of a country that has initiated wars or
military action against six countries since 2001 and has three more
Muslim countries–Syria, Lebanon, and Iran–in its crosshairs and perhaps
several more in Africa, speaking of “the yearnings of peace that burns
in the human heart,” but clearly not in Obama’s heart.

Obama has turned America into a surveillance state that has far more
in common with Stasi East Germany than with the America of the Kennedy
and Reagan eras. Strange, isn’t it, that freedom was gained in East
Germany and lost in America.

At the Brandenburg Gate, Obama invoked the pledge of nations to “a
Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” but Obama continues to violate
human rights both at home and abroad.

Obama has taken hypocrisy to new heights. He has destroyed US civil
liberties guaranteed by the Constitution. In place of a government
accountable to law, he has turned law into a weapon in the hands of the
government. He has intimidated a free press and prosecutes
whistleblowers who reveal his government’s crimes. He makes no objection
when American police brutalize peacefully protesting citizens. His
government intercepts and stores in National Security Agency computers
every communication of every American and also the private
communications of Europeans and Canadians, including the communications
of the members of the governments, the better to blackmail those with
secrets. Obama sends in drones or assassins to murder people in
countries with which the US is not at war, and his victims on most
occasions turn out to be women, children, farmers, and village elders.

Obama kept Bradley Manning in solitary confinement for nearly a year
assaulting his human dignity in an effort to break him and obtain a
false confession. In defiance of the US Constitution, Obama denied
Manning a trial for three years. On Obama’s instructions, London denies
Julian Assange free passage to his political asylum in Ecuador. Assange
has become a modern-day Cardinal Mindszenty. [Jozsef Mindszenty was
the leader of the Hungarian Catholic Church who sought refuge from
Soviet oppression in the US Embassy in Budapest. Denied free passage by
the Soviets, the Cardinal lived in the US Embassy for 15 years as a
symbol of Soviet oppression.]

This is the Obama who asked at the orchestrated event at the
Brandenburg Gate: “Will we live free or in chains? Under governments
that uphold our universal rights, or regimes that suppress them? In open
societies that respect the sanctity of the individual and our free
will, or in closed societies that suffocate the soul?”

When the Berlin Wall came down, the Stasi Spy State that suffocates
the soul moved to Washington. The Stasi is alive and well in the Obama
regime.

James Clapper, on Saturday decried the release of the information and said
media reports about it have been inaccurate Photograph: Saul
Loeb/AFP/Getty Images

(Updated below - Update II - Update III)

I haven't been able to write this week here because I've been participating in the debate over the fallout from last week's NSA
stories, and because we are very busy working on and writing the next
series of stories that will begin appearing very shortly. I did, though,
want to note a few points, and particularly highlight what Democratic Rep. Loretta Sanchez said
after Congress on Wednesday was given a classified briefing by NSA
officials on the agency's previously secret surveillance activities:

"What we learned in there is significantly more than what is out in the media today.
. . . I can't speak to what we learned in there, and I don't know if
there are other leaks, if there's more information somewhere, if
somebody else is going to step up, but I will tell you that I believe it's the tip of the iceberg . . . . I think it's just broader than most people even realize, and I think that's, in one way, what astounded most of us, too."

The
Congresswoman is absolutely right: what we have reported thus far is
merely "the tip of the iceberg" of what the NSA is doing in spying on
Americans and the world. She's also right that when it comes to NSA
spying, "there is significantly more than what is out in the media
today", and that's exactly what we're working to rectify.

But just
consider what she's saying: as a member of Congress, she had no idea
how invasive and vast the NSA's surveillance activities are. Sen. Jon
Tester, who is a member of the Homeland Security Committee, said the
same thing, telling MSNBC about the disclosures that
"I don't see how that compromises the security of this country
whatsoever" and adding: "quite frankly, it helps people like me become
aware of a situation that I wasn't aware of before because I don't sit
on that Intelligence Committee."

How can anyone think that it's
remotely healthy in a democracy to have the NSA building a massive
spying apparatus about which even members of Congress, including
Senators on the Homeland Security Committee, are totally ignorant and
find "astounding" when they learn of them? How can anyone claim with a
straight face that there is robust oversight when even members of the
Senate Intelligence Committee are so constrained in their ability to act
that they are reduced to issuing vague, impotent warnings to the public
about what they call radical "secret law" enabling domestic spying that
would "stun" Americans to learn about it, but are barred to disclose
what it is they're so alarmed by? Put another way, how can anyone
contest the value and justifiability of the stories that we were able to
publish as a result of Edward Snowden's whistleblowing: stories that
informed the American public - including even the US Congress - about
these incredibly consequential programs? What kind of person would think
that it would be preferable to remain in the dark - totally ignorant -
about them?

I have a column in the Guardian's newspaper edition
tomorrow examining the fallout from these stories. That will be posted
here and I won't repeat that now. I will, though, note the following
brief items:

Some
Democrats have tried to distinguish 2006 from 2013 by claiming that the
former involved illegal spying while the latter does not. But the claim
that current NSA spying is legal is dubious in the extreme: the Obama
DOJ has repeatedly thwarted efforts by the ACLU, EFF and others to obtain judicial rulings on their legality and constitutionality by invoking procedural claims of secrecy, immunity and standing.
If Democrats are so sure these spying programs are legal, why has the
Obama DOJ been so eager to block courts from adjudicating that question?

More to the point, Democratic critiques of Bush's spying were
about more than just legality. I know that because I actively
participated in the campaign to amplify those critiques. Indeed, by
2006, most of Bush's spying programs - definitely his bulk collection of
phone records - were already being conducted under the supervision and
with the blessing of the FISA court. Moreover, leading members of
Congress - including Nancy Pelosi - were repeatedly briefed on all
aspects of Bush's NSA spying program. So the distinctions Democrats are
seeking to draw are mostly illusory.

To see how that this is so, just listen to then-Senator Joe Biden
in 2006 attack the NSA for collecting phone records: he does criticize
the program for lacking FISA court supervision (which wasn't actually
true), but also claims to be alarmed by just how invasive and
privacy-destroying that sort of bulk record collection is. He says he
"doesn't think" that the program passes the Fourth Amendment test: how
can Bush's bulk record collection program be unconstitutional while
Obama's program is constitutional? But Biden also rejected Bush's
defense (exactly the argument Obama is making now) - that "we're not
listening to the phone calls, we're just looking for patterns" - by
saying this:

I don't have to listen to
your phone calls to know what you're doing. If I know every single phone
call you made, I'm able to determine every single person you talked to.
I can get a pattern about your life that is very, very intrusive. . . .
If it's true that 200 million Americans' phone calls were monitored -
in terms of not listening to what they said, but to whom they spoke and
who spoke to them - I don't know, the Congress should investigative
this."

Is collecting everyone's phone records not
"very intrusive" when Democrats are doing it? Just listen to that short
segment to see how every defense Obama defenders are making now were the
ones Bush defenders made back then. Again, leading members of Congress
and the FISA court were both briefed on and participants in the Bush
telephone record collection program as well, yet Joe Biden and most
Democrats found those programs very alarming and "very intrusive" back
then.

(2) Notwithstanding the partisan-driven Democratic support for these programs, and notwithstanding the sustained demonization campaign aimed at Edward Snowden from official Washington, polling data, though mixed, has thus far been surprisingly encouraging.

A Time Magazine poll found
that 54% of Americans believe Snowden did "a good thing", while only
30% disagreed. That approval rating is higher than the one enjoyed by
both Congress and President Obama. While a majority think he should be
nonetheless prosecuted, a plurality of young Americans, who
overwhelmingly view Snowden favorably, do not even want to see him
charged. Reuters found that more Americans see Snowden as a "patriot" than a "traitor". A Gallup poll this week found that more Americans disapprove (53%) than approve (37%) of the two NSA spying programs revealed last week by the Guardian.

(3) Thomas Drake, an NSA whistleblower who was unsuccessfully prosecuted by the Obama DOJ, writes in the Guardian
that as a long-time NSA official, he saw all of the same things at the
NSA that Edward Snowden is now warning Americans about. Drake calls
Snowden's acts "an amazingly brave and courageous act of civil
disobedience." William Binney, the mathematician who resigned after a
30-year career as a senior NSA official in protest of post-9/11 domestic
surveillance, said on Democracy Now this week that Snowden's claims about the NSA are absolutely true.

Meanwhile, Daniel Ellsberg, writing in the Guardian,
wrote that "there has not been in American history a more important
leak than Edward Snowden's release of NSA material – and that definitely
includes the Pentagon Papers 40 years ago." He added: "Snowden did what
he did because he recognized the NSA's surveillance programs for what
they are: dangerous, unconstitutional activity."

Listen to actual
experts and patriots - people who have spent their careers inside the
NSA and/or who risked their liberty for the good of the country - and
the truth of Snowden's claims and the justifiability of his acts become
manifest.

(4) As we were about to begin
publishing these NSA stories, a veteran journalist friend warned me that
the tactic used by Democratic partisans would be to cling to and then
endlessly harp on any alleged inaccuracy in any one of the stories we
publish as a means of distracting attention away from the revelations
and discrediting the entire project. That proved quite prescient, as
that is exactly what they are attempting to do.

Thus far we have
revealed four independent programs: the bulk collection of telephone
records, the Prism program, Obama's implementation of an aggressive
foreign and domestic cyber-operations policy, and false claims by NSA
officials to Congress. Every one of those articles was vetted by
multiple Guardian editors and journalists - not just me. Democratic
partisans have raised questions about only one of the stories - the only
one that happened to be also published by the Washington Post (and
presumably vetted by multiple Post editors and journalists) - in order
to claim that an alleged inaccuracy in it means our journalism in
general is discredited.

They are wrong. Our story was not inaccurate. The Washington Post revised parts of its article, but its reporter, Bart Gellman, stands by its core claims
("From their workstations anywhere in the world, government employees
cleared for Prism access may 'task' the system and receive results from
an Internet company without further interaction with the company's
staff").

The Guardian has not revised any of our articles and, to
my knowledge, has no intention to do so. That's because we did not
claim that the NSA document alleging direct collection from the servers
was true; we reported - accurately - that the NSA document claims that
the program allows direct collection from the companies' servers. Before
publishing, we went to the internet companies named in the documents
and asked about these claims. When they denied it, we purposely
presented the story as one of a major discrepancy between what the NSA
document claims and what the internet companies claim, as the headline itself makes indisputably clear:

The NSA document says exactly what we reported. Just read it and judge for yourself
(Prism is "collection directly from the servers of these US service
providers"). It's endearingly naive how some people seem to think that
because government officials or corporate executives issue carefully
crafted denials, this resolves the matter. Read the ACLU's tech expert,
Chris Soghoian, explain why the tech companies' denials are far less
significant and far more semantic than many are claiming.

Nor do
these denials make any sense. If all the tech companies are doing under
Prism is providing what they've always provided to the NSA, but simply
doing it by a different technological means, then why would a new
program be necessary at all? How can NSA officials claim that a program
that does nothing more than change the means for how this data is
delivered is vital in stopping terrorist threats? Why does the NSA
document hail the program as one that enables new forms of collection?
Why would it be "top secret" if all this was were just some new way of
transmitting court-ordered data? How is Prism any different in any
meaningful way from how the relationship between the companies and the
NSA has always functioned?

As a follow-up to our article, the New York Times reported on extensive secret negotiations
between Silicon Valley executives and NSA officials over government
access to the companies' data. It's precisely because these arrangements
are secret and murky yet incredibly significant that we published our
story about these conflicting claims. They ought to be resolved in
public, not in secret. The public should know exactly what access the
NSA is trying to obtain to the data of these companies, and should know
exactly what access these companies are providing. Self-serving,
unchecked, lawyer-vetted denials by these companies don't remotely
resolve these questions.

In a Nation post yesterday, Rick Perlstein falsely accuses me
of not having addressed the questions about the Prism story. I've done
at least half-a-dozen television shows in the last week where I was
asked about exactly those questions and answered fully with exactly what
I've written here (see this appearance with Chris Hayes
as just the latest example); the fact that Perlstein couldn't be
bothered to use Google doesn't entitle him to falsely claim I haven't
addressed these questions. I have done so repeatedly, and do so here
again.

I know that many Democrats want to cling to the belief
that, in Perlstein's words, "the powers that be will find it very easy
to seize on this one error to discredit [my] NSA revelation, even the
ones he nailed dead to rights". Perlstein cleverly writes that "such
distraction campaigns are how power does its dirtiest work" as he
promotes exactly that campaign.

But that won't happen. The
documents and revelations are too powerful. The story isn't me, or
Edward Snowden, or the eagerness of Democratic partisans to defend the
NSA as a means of defending President Obama, and try as they might,
Democrats won't succeed in making the story be any of those things. The
story is the worldwide surveillance apparatus the NSA is constructing in
the dark and the way that has grown under Obama, and that's where my focus is going to remain.

(5) NYU Journalism professor Jay Rosen examines complaints
that my having strong, candidly acknowledged opinions on surveillance
policies somehow means that the journalism I do on those issues is
suspect. It is very worth reading what he has to say on this topic as it
gets to the heart about several core myths about what journalism is.

(6) Last week, prior to the revelation of our source's identity, I wrote that
"ever since the Nixon administration broke into the office of Daniel
Ellsberg's psychoanalyst's office, the tactic of the US government has
been to attack and demonize whistleblowers as a means of distracting
attention from their own exposed wrongdoing and destroying the
credibility of the messenger so that everyone tunes out the message" and
"that attempt will undoubtedly be made here."

The predictable personality assaults on Snowden
have begun in full force from official Washington and their media
spokespeople. They are only going to intensify. There is nobody who
political officials and their supine media class hate more than those
who meaningfully dissent from their institutional orthodoxies and shine
light on what they do. The hatred for such individuals is boundless.

There are two great columns on this dynamic. This one
by Reuters' Jack Shafer explores how elite Washington reveres powerful
leakers that glorify political officials, but only hate marginalized and
powerless leakers who discredit Washington and its institutions. And
perhaps the best column yet on Snowden
comes this morning from the Daily Beast's Kirsten Powers: just please
take the time to read it all, as it really conveys the political and
psychological rot that is driving the attacks on him and on his very
carefully vetted disclosures.

UPDATE

The New York Times reports today
that Yahoo went to court in order to vehemently resist the NSA's
directive that they join the Prism program, and joined only when the
court compelled it to do so. The company specifically "argued that the
order violated its users' Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable
searches and seizures."

If, as NSA (and Silicon Valley) defenders
claim, Prism is nothing more than a harmless little drop-box mechanism
for delivering to the government what these companies were already
providing, why would Yahoo possibly be in court so vigorously resisting
it and arguing that it violates their users' Fourth Amendment rights?
Similarly, how could it possibly be said - as US government officials
have - that Prism has been instrumental in stopping terrorist plots if
it did not enhance the NSA's collection capabilities? The denials from
the internet companies make little sense when compared to what we know
about the program. At the very least, there is ample reason to demand
more disclosure and transparency about exactly what this is and what
data-access arrangements they have agreed to.

UPDATE II

My column that is appearing in the Guardian newspaper, on the fallout from the NSA stories, is now posted here.

UPDATE III

Underscoring
all of these points, please take two minutes to watch this amazing
video, courtesy of EFF, in which the 2006 version of Joe Biden
aggressively debates the 2013 version of Barack Obama on whether the US
government should be engaged in the bulk collection of American's phone
records:

On July 1, interest rates will double for millions of students –
from 3.4% to 6.8% – unless Congress acts; and the legislative fixes on
the table are largely just compromises. Only one proposal promises real
relief – Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s “Bank on Students Loan Fairness Act.”
This bill has been dismissed out of hand as “shameless populist
demagoguery” and “a cheap political gimmick,” but is it? Or could
Warren’s outside-the-box bill represent the sort of game-changing
thinking sorely needed to turn the economy around?

Warren and her co-sponsor John Tierney propose that students be
allowed to borrow directly from the government at the same rate that
banks get from the Federal Reserve — 0.75 percent. They argue:

Some people say that we can’t afford low interest rates
for students. But the federal government offers far lower rates on loans
every single day — they just don’t do it for everyone. Right now, a
bank can get a loan through the Federal Reserve discount window at a
rate of less than one percent. The same big banks that destroyed
millions of jobs and broke our economy can borrow at about 0.75 percent,
while our students will be paying nine times as much as of July 1.This is not fair. And it’s not necessary, either. The federal
government makes 36 cents on every dollar it lends to students. Just
last week, the Congressional Budget Office announced that the government
will make $51 billion on the student loans it issued this year — more
than the annual profit of any Fortune 500 company, and about five times
Google’s yearly earnings. We should not be profiting from students who
are drowning in debt while we are giving great deals to big banks.

The archly critical Brookings Institute says the bill “confuses
market interest rates on long-term loans (such as the 10-year Treasury
rate) with the Federal Reserve’s Discount Window (used to make
short-term loans to banks), and does not reflect the administrative
costs and default risk that increase the costs of the federal student
loan program.”

Those criticisms would be valid if the provider of funds were either a
private bank or the American taxpayer; but in this case, it is the U.S.
Federal Reserve. Warren and Tierney assert,
“For one year, the Federal Reserve would make funds available to the
Department of Education to make these loans to our students.” For the
Fed, completely different banking rules apply. As “lender of last
resort,” it can expand its balance sheet
by buying all the assets it likes. The Fed bought over $1 trillion in
“toxic” mortgage-backed securities in QE 1, and reportedly turned a
profit on them. It could just as easily buy $1 trillion in student debt
and refinance it at 0.75%.

Which Is a Better Investment, Banks or Students?

Students are considered risky investments because they don’t own
valuable assets against which the debt can be collected. But this
argument overlooks the fact that these young trainees are assets
themselves. They represent an investment in “human capital” that can pay
for itself many times over, if properly supported and developed. This
was demonstrated in the 1940s with the G.I. Bill, which provided free
technical training and educational support for nearly 16 million
returning servicemen, along with government-subsidized loans and
unemployment benefits. The outlay not only paid for itself but returned a
substantial profit to the government and significant stimulus to the
economy. It made higher education accessible to all and created a nation
of homeowners, new technology, new products, and new companies, with
the Veterans Administration guaranteeing an estimated 53,000 business
loans. Economists have determined that for every 1944 dollar invested, the country received approximately $7 in return, through increased economic productivity, consumer spending, and tax revenues.

Similarly in the 1930s and 1940s, the Reconstruction Finance Corporation funded the New Deal and World War II
and wound up turning a profit, without drawing on taxpayer funds. It’s
an initial capitalization was only $500 million; yet the RFC eventually
lent out $50 billion – the equivalent of about $500 billion today. It
raised money by issuing debentures, a form of bond. It got all of this
money back, made a profit for the government, and left a legacy of
roads, bridges, dams, post offices, universities, electrical power,
mortgages, farms, and much more that the country did not have before.

In 1944, President Franklin Roosevelt proposed an Economic Bill of
Rights, in which higher education would be provided by the government
for free; and in the progressive 1960s, tuition actually was free or
nearly free at state universities. Some countries provide nearly-free
higher education today. In Norway, Denmark, France and Sweden, the cost of college is less than 3% of median income, as compared to 51% in the U.S.

Banks Are Good Credit Risks Only Because They Are Backed by the Government

In a National Review article titled “Warren’s Student-loan Demagoguery,”
Ian Tuttle argues that the discount window should not be available to
students because the Fed defines that resource as “an instrument of
monetary policy that allows eligible institutions to borrow money,
usually on a short-term basis, to meet temporary shortages of liquidity
caused by internal or external disruptions,” and because the discount
window is “an emergency measure used to prevent runs on banks.”

It may be true that the Fed’s discount window is open only to banks,
but the Federal Reserve Pact was passed by Congress and can be modified
by Congress. The reasoning behind the policy needs to be re-examined.

The question is, why dobanks routinely have “shortages
of liquidity”? What does that mean? It means they have lent out
depositor funds that don’t properly belong to them, gambling that they
will be able to replace the money before the depositors demand it back.
The banks have a binding commitment to return customer money “on
demand.” They can make good on that commitment because, and only
because, the Fed and the FDIC back them up in a massive shell game, in
which they borrow from each other or the Fed overnight
– just long enough to make their books appear to balance – and then
give the money back the next day. Banks are good credit risks only
because they have the backstop of the Fed and the government behind
them. Without those guarantees, we would be back to the cycle of endless
bank runs of the 19th and early 20th centuries.

“Our students are just as important to our recovery,” says Warren,
“as our banks.” What if students, too, were backed by the government’s
guarantee? What if, as in Australia and New Zealand, students were not
required to repay the investment in human capital represented by their
educations until the economy provided them with jobs? What if the
government made it a policy to provide them with jobs? This too has been
done before, quite successfully. It was part of Roosevelt’s New Deal. As detailed by Prof. Randall Wray, citing N. Taylor’s The Enduring Legacy of the WPA:

The New Deal jobs programs employed 13 million people;
the WPA was the biggest program, employing 8.5 million, lasting 8 years
and spending about $10.5 billion. It took a broken country and in many
important respects helped to not only revive it, but to bring it into
the 20th century. The WPA built 650,000 miles of roads, 78,000 bridges,
125,000 civilian and military buildings, 700 miles of airport runways;
it fed 900 million hot lunches to kids, operated 1500 nursery schools,
gave concerts before audiences of 150 million, and created 475,000 works
of art. It transformed and modernized America.

In the 1930s, the government was in a worse financial position to
achieve all this than it is now; but the commitment and the will were
there, and the means were found. In World War II, the means were found
again. The government always seems to be able to find the means to fund a
war. We can just as easily find the means to fund our economic
recovery. And if the funding comes from the Federal Reserve, the
government need not be propelled into a mounting debt owed at mounting
interest. The funds can be provided interest-free; and because they
represent an investment in productive capital, the debt itself can be
repaid with the fruits of the investment – the jobs that create the
salaries that generate taxes and consumer demand.

The default rate on student loans is close to 10% today because there
are no jobs available to repay the loans, and because the interest rate
is so high that the debt is doubled or tripled over the life of the
loan. Give students loans and jobs, and the default problem will cure
itself.

Investing in our young people has worked before and can work again;
and if Congress orders the Fed to fund this investment in our collective
futures by “quantitative easing,” it need cost the taxpayers nothing at
all. The Japanese have finally seen the light and are using their QE tool as economic stimulus rather than just to keep their banks afloat, and we need to do the same.

It has been public information for a decade that the US government
secretly, illegally, and unconstitutionally spies on its citizens.
Congress and the federal courts have done nothing about this extreme
violation of the US Constitution and statutory law, and the insouciant
US public seems unperturbed.

In 2004 a whistleblower informed the New York Times that the National
Security Agency (NSA) was violating the Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Act (FISA) by ignoring the FISA court and spying on
Americans without obtaining the necessary warrants. The corrupt New
York Times put the interests of the US government ahead of those of the
American public and sat on the story for one year until George W. Bush
was safely reelected.

By the time the New York Times published the story of the illegal
spying one year later, the law-breaking government had had time to
mitigate the offense with ex post facto law or executive orders and
explain away its law-breaking as being in the country’s interest.

Last year William Binney, who was in charge of NSA’s global digital data
gathering program revealed that NSA had everyone in the US under total
surveillance. Every email, Internet site visited and phone call is
captured and stored. In 2012 Binney received the Callaway Award for
Civic Courage, an annual award given to those who champion
constitutional rights at risk to their professional and personal lives.

The presstitute media handled these stories in ways that protected the
government’s lawlessness from scrutiny and public outrage. The usual
spin was that the public needs to be safe from terrorists, and safety is
what the government is providing.

The latest whistle blower, Edward Snowden, has sought refuge in Hong
Kong, which has a better record of protecting free speech than the US
government. Snowden did not trust any US news source and took the story
to the British newspaper, the Guardian.

There is no longer any doubt whatsoever that the US government is
lawless, that it regards the US Constitution as a scrap of paper, that
it does not believe Americans have any rights other than those that the
government tolerates at any point in time, and that the government has
no fear of being held accountable by the weak and castrated US Congress,
the sycophantic federal courts, a controlled media, and an insouciant
public.

Binney and Snowden have described in precisely accurate detail the
extreme danger from the government’s surveillance of the population. No
one is exempt, not the Director of the CIA, US Army Generals, Senators
and Representatives, not even the president himself.

Anyone with access to a computer and the Internet can find interviews
with Binney and Snowden and become acquainted with why you do have very
much indeed to fear whether or not you are doing anything wrong.

Clapper is “offended” that Americans now know that the NSA is spying on
the ordinary life of every American. Clapper wants Snowden to be
severely punished for his “reckless disclosure” that the US government
is totally violating the privacy that the US Constitution guarantees to
every US citizen.

President Obama, allegedly educated in constitutional law, justified
Clapper’s program of spying on every communication of every American
citizen as a necessary violation of Americans’ civil liberties that
“protects your civil liberties.” Contrast the lack of veracity of the
President of the United States with the truthfulness of Snowden, who
correctly stated that the NSA spying is an “existential threat to
democracy.”

The presstitutes are busy at work defending Clapper and Obama. On June
9, CNN rolled out former CIA case officer Bob Baer to implant into the
public’s mind that Snowden, far from trying to preserve US civil
liberties, might be a Chinese spy and that Snowden’s revelations might
be indicative of a Chinese espionage case.

Demonization is the US government’s technique for discrediting Bradley
Manning for complying with the US Military Code and reporting war crimes
and for persecuting Julian Assage of Wikileaks for reporting leaked
information about the US government’s crimes. Demonization and false
charges will be the government’s weapon against Snowden.

If Washington and its presstitutes can convince Americans that
courageous people, who are trying to inform Americans that their
historic rights are disappearing into a police state, are espionage
agents of foreign powers, America can continue to be subverted by its
own government.

This brings us to the crux of the matter. What is the purpose of the spying program?

Even if an American believes the official stories of 9/11 and the Boston
Marathon Bombing, these are the only two terrorist acts in the US that
resulted in the loss of human life in 12 years. Far more people are
killed in traffic accidents and from bad diets. Why should the
Constitution and civil liberty be deep-sixed because of two alleged
terrorist acts in 12 years?

What is astounding is the absence of terrorist attacks. Washington is in
the second decade of invading and destroying Muslim governments and
countries. Civilian casualties in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya are
extremely high, and in those countries that Washington has not yet
invaded, such as Pakistan, Yemen, and Syria, civilians are being
murdered by Washington’s drones and proxies on the ground.

It is extraordinary that Washington’s brutal 12 year assault on Muslim
lives in six countries has not resulted in at least one dozen real, not
fake FBI orchestrated, terrorist attacks in the US every day.

How can something as rare as terrorism justify the destruction of the US
Constitution and US civil liberty? How safe is any American when their
government regards every citizen as a potential suspect who has no
rights?

Why is there no discussion of this in American public life? Watch the
presstitutes turn Snowden’s revelations into an account of his
disaffection and motives and away from the existential threat to
democracy and civil liberty.

What is the government’s real agenda? Clearly, “the war on terror” is a
front for an undeclared agenda. In “freedom and democracy” America,
citizens have no idea what their government’s motives are in fomenting
endless wars and a gestapo police state. The only information Americans
have comes from whistleblowers, who Obama ruthlessly prosecutes. The
presstitutes quickly discredit the information and demonize the
whistleblowers.

Germans in the Third Reich and Soviet citizens in the Stalin era had a
better idea of their government’s agendas than do “freedom and
democracy” Americans today. The American people are the most uninformed
people in modern history.

In America there is no democracy that holds government accountable.
There is only a brainwashed people who are chaff in the wind.

About Me

B.S. in Physics, Carnegie-Mellon University, 1960 Ph.D. in Physics, Brown University, 1966. Fellow, American Physical
Society. Fellow, American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Fellow, American Ceramic Society. Member, Geological Society of America, Research Physicist at Naval Research Laboratory (NRL), Washington, DC,
1967-2001. Fulbright-García Robles Fellow at Universidad Nacional
Autónoma de México, 1997. Invited Professor of Research at Universités
de Paris-6 & 7, Lyon-1, et St-Etienne (France) and Tokyo Institute
of Technology, 2000-2004. Adjunct Professor of Materials Science and
Engineering, University of Arizona, 2004-2005. Consultancy: impactGlass
research international, 2005-present.
Winner, one national and two international research awards and honored
by Brown University with a "Distinguished Graduate School Alumnus
Award." Author, 198 papers in peer-reviewed journals and books, Principal Author of 114 of these.